


Alternate

by PinkestDreamer



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Reality, Post S3
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2017-09-11
Packaged: 2018-12-19 13:10:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11898414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PinkestDreamer/pseuds/PinkestDreamer
Summary: They all tumble from the force of it, and the ancient Altean metal groans from the shockwaves, the ship floating to angle. In front of them, something tears into space and time, and leaves a horrible glowing gash floating in the middle of it all. An alternate reality reaches out to Voltron for help.





	1. The Gash

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic in a very long time, but Voltron really inspires me and I love it a lot. I asked myself if they would ever encounter more realities. Here's hoping they do!

It shakes the ship.

 

It simply appeared and shook the ship.

 

They all tumble from the force of it, and the ancient Altean metal groans from the shockwaves, the ship floating to angle. In front of them, something tears into space and time, and leaves a horrible glowing gash floating in the middle of it all. It emits a violently bright light and they shield their eyes from it by putting hands over their brows.

 

Their shadows stretch across the floor, thin and long.

 

“No way,” Lance says. He’s the first to speak as they all look at the thing in awe. “It can’t be. Can things like this just appear now? I mean, we didn’t provoke it…”

 

Pidge speaks next, lowering her hand to observe it clearly. “Coran, zoom in on it. It looks just like--”

 

“Like the wormhole thing we went through,” Hunk interrupts, taking a few slow steps forwards, then gaining enough courage to stand beside Coran as the Altean works the controls. A magnified version of the gash appears on the screen, and they all take it in. Particles of quintessence float by, looking innocent enough to lure any fool in.

 

Before them floating in the middle of space, having erupted from nowhere, was a gash leading to an alternate reality. It starts growing as though someone’s tearing it with a knife from the other side. It tears until it’s big enough to challenge the Castle of Lions’ size. Then it stops.

 

Everyone looks it over tensely, washed out by the yellow lighting. Memories from their past alternate-reality encounter flashing by in their heads, as the gash continued to glow, oblivious and unaware of their judgement.

 

Keith’s hands ball into fists, “Maybe it’s the alternate Alteans, maybe they found a way to reach this reality.”

 

Hunk panics in the background as Allura turns to meet Keith’s gaze, “We should investigate immediately.”

 

No one takes the time to consider Shiro, who looks confused, and who stays on deck with Coran instead of joining the paladins. He stares after them as they rush to their compartments without him, without so much as looking back.

 

Coran stares at the gash with too much focus to notice the lost look Shiro gives him. Instead, Shiro’s eyes focus on the lions as they leave, hearing Keith’s rough voice giving orders to stay in formation.

 

Nothing comes out of the gash other than the innocent quintessence particles, leaving all the paladins on edge as they stare at a light that blinds their eyes.

 

Despite all the communicators being open, nothing is heard. Breaths are silent, and the dins from the lions’ computers are quiet.

 

Keith pushes the Black Lion a little bit closer. All the other paladins watch anxiously as Black settles into her ever-graceful bob in space, her tail dancing as she moves.

 

“Hunk,” Keith calls out, “Any bio-signatures?”

 

Hunk’s leg is jumping up and down, his fingers squeezing at Yellow’s controls, and his voice is strained when he answers, “No. None. _Nada_. Zip. Zero.”

 

“No anomalies on my scanners either,” Pidge chimes in.

 

“I suppose you can’t explain this phenomenon either, right, Pidge?” Keith asks. “Coran, anything to show me?”

 

Both Pidge and Coran say no.

 

“Then we must go in,” says Allura.

 

“Are you _kidding_ me?! Getting in almost got us killed that one time!” Hunk explodes. His hands jerk Yellow’s controls, and the lion rocks in space as Hunk panics.

 

Shiro is still lost on the topic, but feels his heart race when they talk about alternates and almost dying. What had happened while he was gone, and why hadn’t they told him anything?

 

“What if it is yet another reality? A different one?” Allura presses on.

 

“No, we’re not going!”

 

“Hunk,” Keith sighs, “We’re not going anywhere yet, we still don’t know any-- wait, look.”

 

Just below the Black Lion, a ship passes through the rift. It’s a tiny beat-up thing, but its outside is colored black, with lines of blue crossing the surface. All the energy readings maxed out immediately, the comms chime with the simultaneous alerts and signatures.

 

The lions floated back to allow the ship room. It barely compares to the mighty limbs of Voltron, being the size of roughly one of the lion’s claws.

 

“It follows Voltron’s same readings, like the comet!” Pidge yelled, her hands gripping her controllers tighter. “This isn’t good. Keith?”

 

“Don’t fire yet,” he instructs, and his eyes narrow as he observes the ship float around uselessly in space. “It hasn’t fired us yet. It doesn’t have any bio-signatures attached. Hunk… grab it.”

 

“But--”

 

“We need to know, Hunk. You have the best armor, should the ship attack--”

 

“Fine,” he interrupts, and reluctantly pushes Yellow closer, and the lion opens its jaw to take in the ship. The jaw clamps shut, and Hunk wastes no moment in leaves his pilot’s chair, with his bayard formed. He rushes to the ship waiting at Yellow’s tongue. His heavy breathing echoes in all of the other paladins comms, including Coran’s broadcast.

 

“It looks like the comet… sort of,” he comments as he stares at it from afar, holding his gun out. He takes a step closer, expecting for it to jump out at him. The dim blue lights of Yellow’s interior make it look creepier than it is. It sits there unmoving.

 

“C’mon buddy, you got this,” Lance encourages softly.

 

Hunk takes tiny steps at first until he moves forwards close enough to place a hand on the comet. His skin _buzzes_ at the contact, even when under the gloves in his paladin uniform.

 

“It has the same look of the second comet,” he repeats, this time in awe as his hand keeps in contact with it, “Even the energy signature. It’s nearly identical to Voltron’s. It’s… not hot or cold, I don’t know how to describe it.”

 

“That’s just the exterior,” Pidge’s voice cuts through the comms. “It had thrusters, it’s a ship.”

 

“Yeah, a crudely made one, at that,” Hunk walks a circle around it and inspects the thrusters. “They’re badly built, there’s pieces jammed in there that aren’t following their original purpose at all. It’s like making Nachos with chocolate fudge sauce…”

 

He grosses himself out with his own imagination, but his thoughts are cut short when he notices the indents on the side of the ship. His hand reaches out to them so his fingers can trace it. It forms a perfect square over the top of the ship, like a hatch. He finally turns on his helmet’s video-feed for the rest to see.

 

“What… is that…” Shiro says breathlessly to Coran, as they both look at it with wide eyes.

 

“I’ve no clue,” Coran honestly responds, scratching at his mustache.

 

“This thing uses a piece of the comet as its surface exterior, like an exoskeleton,” Hunk crouches to the floor and sees the poor attempt at welding the black surface to the top of the ship. The underbelly is light gray, the black material from the comet is roughly melted to it, and he can see half of a blue sphere. It reminds him a lot of how Earth’s globes were drawn. The sphere with the lines of latitude and longitude. “Do you guys see this?”

 

Keith stares at it incredulously, Lance gasps at the sight, Shiro straightens up back at the Castle.

 

“It’s a Garrison shuttle,” Shiro gasps next to Coran. Coran looks at him with disbelief. Shiro’s words were spoken too softly to pass through the comms, but they held urgency either way.

 

“It’s an old-model Garrison Ship,” Keith verifies from his seat in the Black Lion. “Shiro and I used to train on them a lot back on Earth…”

 

“Yeah, I used to train on them too for the entrance exams,” Lance added, pushing Red closer to Yellow, though it wouldn’t make him see anything more from Hunk’s broadcast.

 

Shiro takes over the microphone in the castle as Coran stands by his shoulder.

 

“Hunk, check to see if there’s anyone inside.”

 

“But we detected zero bio-rhythms,” Hunk complains, looking at the hatch apprehensively.

 

“Not any from this dimension,” Lance corrects. “Maybe the alternate dimension person in there has a different signature…”

 

Hunk sighs and stands tall again. He undoes his bayard to grasp at the ship firmly. His fingers are too thick to wedge in the small indent he saw earlier.

 

“I will go in with you,” Allura offers, putting Blue just near enough Yellow’s mouth to make a short space walk. She glides through on her jetpack, and Hunk opens Yellow’s mouth just a smidge for her to pass through.

 

Allura is stronger than any of them are, and her fingers are daintier. She manages to crack the hatch open and raises it far beyond her head to inspect the ship’s insides.

 

“It’s… empty.”

 

* * *

 

Lance stayed outside in Red as watchman while everyone else parked near Yellow and entered its mouth to see the ship for themselves.

 

Pidge and Hunk were running various tests on it, while Keith and Allura prodded at it to see if they could find more clues.

 

“There, see the half-globe? Try to pick off some of the black coat,” he instructed Allura as she used his formed bayard to lever it out. The black sword did not bend, but it did not help either.

 

“It’s too melted in,” she grunted, the sword sliding off the black coat.

 

“Coran, run an x-ray on this thing,” Keith scans the corner of the ship, and seconds later, Coran wordlessly sends them back an x-ray image. The undercoat of the ship shows light gray just as the underbelly, and the globe is a finished sphere, complete with the latitudes and longitudes, right next to the words

 

 

 

 

“The SES was a real program in _this_ reality,” Shiro says.

 

Keith nods to it, “The Space Exploration System…”

 

“Guys, look at this,” Pidge’s voice is urgent and her short arm actually stretches out to grasp Keith’s. He lets her drag him close, towering over her as she shows him files stored in the ship’s software.

 

“It was hacked,” her little finger hovers over the screen. The filename is different from all the other integrants of the code. KT-HCK is a striking green against the mundane white coding. “I’m decoding it right now.”

 

There was something about the way she spoke, a tightness in her throat, that left Keith staring at her face instead of the screen. Her eyes were glassy, and her brow furrowed deeper than usual.

 

He takes off his helmet, and cherishes the freedom in his jaw, and the way his hair doesn’t bunch up around his nape anymore, the way his breath doesn’t know back at him when he sighs.

 

“What do you know?” he asked softly.

 

“It’s…” she hesitates, and takes off her helmet to breathe too. Everyone else allows them that privacy, instead staring at the screen in her wrist. It lights up the room a teal blue. “It’s probably nothing. Just the anxiety. The nature of it all.”

 

Keith raised his brow at the response, and the hologram pinged to call for their attention.

 

A readout pops up, written in English, a language they had not seen in quite some time.

 

 

 

“Guys, it’s closing!” Lance’s voice cuts through the comms before Yellow starts shaking.

 

The alternate reality gash flickers, and the lions all shake violently at the way space and time push at the wound. It releases a shriek as it zips closed, slowly as if with agony, until it mends, and before them floats nothing but space again, in its fierce infinity.

 


	2. The Fight

After inspecting it for tracing devices and other outside sources, they brought the ship back to the castle. Everyone meets up in Yellow’s hangar as Yellow daintily lowers the ship to the ground, teeth softly holding it in place.

Pidge runs straight to Coran with her findings on her holoscreen, and everyone else waits for Hunk to walk down Yellow’s ramp.

“It’s not a formal use of coding language, but it fit the software inside the ship despite being considered an error. It was definitely meant for someone to find it,” Pidge shows it to Coran. Everyone waits for him to react and lighten the tension the way he always does. Instead, he keeps quiet, scratching his moustache pensively. The paladins share glances as the spell of silence stretches on.

“We can’t charge in there,” Shiro breaks the silence, “We don’t know what’s waiting on the other side, it could be an ambush.”

“It could also be people in danger,” Lance’s voice was soft, but the urgency in his tone carried loud across the room. “It could be _Earth_ , our _home_ , in danger of being destroyed, and creating this… this last resort ship to send out to us.”

“Whatever it was, it’s toast now!” Hunk explodes, taking a step forwards, “The wormhole closed right in front of us! How did it even open in the first place?”

“None of us know, Hunk,” Allura places a hand on his shoulder, facing Coran and Pidge, who were still side-by-side inspecting the code. “If it opened once, is it possible for it to be opened again?”

“Well, if it were a normal thing under normal circumstances, then yes,” Pidge still hasn’t put on her glasses, having just taken off her helmet. “But they’re not normal, and we’re in space, which is infinite and weird.”

That answer was a bit offhand, Keith deduces as he raises a brow at Pidge again. He crosses his arms, too overwhelmed by what’s been happening to take a side. _Should alternate Earth be saved? Was it a trap? How did the Garrison ship survive the trip?_

Would another meteor in another reality signify another Voltron? What if Lotor already knows of it?

Allura pulled him out of his daze when she calls him for the fifth time, and he blinks into focus to find everyone staring at him, Shiro included.

“You’re Voltron’s head now,” Allura says once she has his attention, “You should lead us on where to go…”

Keith looks to Shiro, who meets his gaze head on. The black paladin suit was still over Shiro’s form, but the Black Lion moved under Keith’s hand now. Was the world always this confusing?

“But Shiro--”

“Can’t go anywhere in Voltron,” the black paladin responds, taking off his helmet to put on his hip. “So _Shiro_ can’t make any decisions involving Voltron’s destination.”

Keith didn’t know what to say as he watched Shiro extend his arm to gesture at him. “You, however, can.”

  
He could. Him, the dropout, who lived a year by himself in a shack on a desert, whose sanity was questioned when he stated Shiro wasn’t dead, who was defined by his impulsiveness rather than his leadership or integrity.

Everyone looked at him again for guidance, and he found himself doubting every idea that popped in his head. The ideas accumulated, piling up faster, and faster, until he couldn’t focus on them anymore, and rather focused on the negative outcomes of each and every idea.

“We need to…” he began, his fists tightening, he felt a lump in his throat, and became unable to form words. What do they need to do? The ideas kept piling up, pushing at each other in his head until he felt pain in his skull. His mind grew blank and all he felt was surging panic.

“We need to gather more information,” Pidge completes the thought for him. “In order to deduce if this threat is real.”

“That alternate Earth could be dying right now, _as we speak_ ,” Lance takes off his helmet too. “We can’t take a million years to decide.”

Now in this, Keith has more practice: logical thinking. Selfish, rude, logical thinking.

“Our Earth is fine, and that must be our first priority always,” he states, “If we consider every reality that ever existed, to save every Earth there is we would never finish our mission. It’s an impossible task.”

Lance opens his mouth to fight back, to spit out how ‘ _selfish and heartless that is, Keith!_ ’ When Pidge comes to Keith’s rescue.

“He’s right. The reality we entered with Sven and Slav and the Guns of Gamara… it might have had a planet Earth too, but we never once stopped to consider it.”

“We had other things to figure out!” Lance defended. “I thought about Earth. Didn’t you?! My family is there! Not everyone was ready to drop everything and go to space, where their father and brother were so conveniently placed!”

  
She gets offended at his outburst and takes some steps forwards, switching off her hologram and jabbing a finger in his chest. He’s taller than her, and she has to look up to yell at him.

“Don’t you _dare_ bring family into this!” Her voice is rough, her cheeks redden in anger, and her eyes are glossy again. “Lance-!”

“There’s probably a Matt and a Mr. Holt in that other reality waiting for you to come in and save them, and save Earth!”

She pushes at Lance’s chest, but he doesn’t budge. By now, the others are trying to get them to stop by calling their names. They both ignore them.

“YOU SHUT UP! You don’t know _anything_!” She yells at the top of her lungs, and pushes him again. She squints her eyes and tears fall out, and she doesn’t want to cry in front of them but she does. Lance slams his jaw shut and recognizes he pushed too far. He was left vulnerable to her, and in her anger, she pushes him back so hard he falls to the ground. For a second, neither of them registers what happened, and stare at each other in disbelief before Pidge breaks out in a sprint.

Her helmet is discarded to the floor, thrown hard and far in her anger, bouncing a few times until it rolls to a stop. The sounds of it hitting the floor echoes in the otherwise silent hangar, and what follows are her footsteps as she runs off, pushing past the Garrison ship. Her hands buzzes for the split second it makes contact, but no one notices.

They all stare at the door that slides shut after her.

Allura moves to go fetch Pidge, but Keith halts her with a hand on her shoulder. “Everyone will dedicate themselves to finding the information we need. I’ll talk to Pidge and be back soon.”

He turns back to Lance, but doesn’t say anything as he watches Hunk offer him a hand to help him up.

 


	3. The Confession

Keith finds Pidge in her mess of a room. There are dirty clothes thrown across the floor, and floating trays and containers filled with curiosities.  She has a habit of hoarding everything she can find. Keith nudges the floating cups away and pushes further.

 

The cutlery jingles as it’s shoved away, and the crying Pidge looks over her shoulder for split second. She catches glimpses of Keith’s red paladin suit and looks back down, tears falling from her eyes. Keith hesitates before taking a few more steps forwards. Her slippers were next to the bed pedestal.

 

Next to the slippers, four circuit boards in disarray, with cables and sections cut loose. Three jars of space goo float nearby, and he looks at them bob up and down until he waits for Pidge to acknowledge his presence again.

 

She’s sniffling in her bed, her arm rubs at her eyes roughly as she hiccups. Her small frame shakes with the force of her sobs, and she buries her face in her pillow. She probably wasn’t going to talk to Keith anytime soon.

 

Keith decides to keep waiting and curiously reaches out to the floating space goo.

 

“Don’t _touch_ anything!”

 

He flinches.

 

He isn’t the best at interacting with other people’s spaces. Keith pulls his arm back and looks at Pidge, who sits up to scold him. Her nose is scrunched up, and her eyes red and puffy. Her face is flushed, she rubs at the snot that falls from her nose.

 

“Sorry,” he says softly, facing her.

 

They stare at each other awkwardly until he speaks, “What happened back there, Pidge?”

 

She scrunches her nose even more, if possible, and turns away from him.

 

“Lance sometimes doesn’t think before he speaks,” Keith tries again, figuring he could play as mediator just this once. For Pidge.

 

“He went too far,” she huffs.

 

“He did.”

 

“I think the other Earth is real.”

 

Keith has to pause after that outburst, taking in Pidge’s face. Where did _that_ come from? Her face softens up, and now she just looks miserable instead of angry. Tears still fall, curving past her cheeks by the dozen.

 

“How come?” he asks, taking a step closer, sitting down on the edge of the mattress. It sinks under his weight, and she sits up and curls into herself, knees to chest.

 

“That code we read? The file name…”

 

“HK… something?”

 

“KT-HCK,” she replies right after, with a bit of a growl. Keith blinks at that, and crosses his arms.

 

“What about it?” he asks. He watches how she wipes away her tears with the butt of her palm, roughly gliding through the skin of her face. She reaches for the glasses she always wore, hidden under her pillow. Instead of putting them on, she stares at them wistfully. Keith gives her time to respond.

 

He watches Pidge play with the glasses, look at them, wipe at the crystal circles, twirl them around. He watches her take comfort in them, and thinks back to the first time he realized there was strength held and hidden within things. No matter how ordinary they were.  

 

Like alien daggers, or a father’s old jacket that now reaches a midriff, or old Garrison cadet boots, or a stolen hovercraft, or an old calendar with notes in Shiro’s handwriting back at a shack in the desert.

 

Like glasses, for example: Matt’s glasses. The ones that Pidge held so delicately between her fingers, as a prized treasure.

 

“When I just started showing an interest in programs and computers, Matt already knew a little bit more about them than me,” she said quietly. Keith focuses on her again, stares at her eyes as they stare at the metal frame of the glasses. He wouldn’t consider Pidge being the kind of person to share stuff about her past that way, in long talks with sad memories. She’s kept to herself for so long anyway.

 

“So he’d write simple programs for me to follow or encrypt or decode, all that stuff,” she chuckles, twirling the glasses by one of its legs. The flimsy thing dances in her fingers and she smiles at them, almost crying again. “We were just kids, and he was always a good brother to me, we almost never fought.

  
“Y’know, my real name is Katie. I’ve said it before, but sometimes you guys forget.”

 

Keith nods. She looks at him and lowers the glasses to her lap.

 

“Matt would make programs for me and use that filename. KT-HCK…” she moves her hands to make air quotes, “ ‘Katie.’ ‘Hack.’ “

 

Keith’s eyes widen in realization.

 

_This was what bothered her when she first discovered the code._

 

“You think Matt is reaching out to you?”

 

“I think an alternate version of Matt is trying to reach us.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Some of the molecules from its surface aren’t in the ship’s information system,” Hunk reports to Keith when he makes it back to Yellow’s hangar.

 

The Garrison ship is still there, under Yellow’s chest. The lion looks like it's mighty guardian standing like that. Hunk has Pidge’s computer plugged into the black meteor surface of the shuttle, and it rests on his cross-legged lap.

 

Keith turns to Coran, who tugs at his mustache as he keeps scrolling through the ship’s database. Shiro and Allura stand nearby with crossed arms, observing in silence. Lance sulks, laying against Yellow’s massive hind leg. He has his helmet.

 

“How was Pidge?” Allura brings up. Keith runs a hand through his hair and feels  headache start to form.

 

“She’s… processing some info for me. I told her to take her time. But she’s fine now,” he answers.

 

At that, Lance perks up, looking over his shoulder at the rest of the people in the hangar. He doesn’t sit up, however. Keith notices that.

 

“Well, I’m glad that was… settled,” Allura chose the word carefully, wringing her hands together.

 

“Me too,” huffs Hunk, burying his nose back into the computer.

 

“Well,” Coran lets go of his mustache, turns around, and faces everyone in the hangar. “I think I have it! Do you want to hear it now? It’s not a very solid theory.”

 

Before anyone can answer, Lance does, pushing against Yellow to stand. “Spit it out already!”

 

His tone of voice was impatient rather than angry, and he walks to join Keith’s side.

 

“The molecules not belonging to the database could mean one of two things. Either these molecules have not been added in the system for 10,000 years… which is very likely.”

 

“Or! Or… they belong to an alternate reality,” Hunk pipes up, bringing his hands to his face in excitement.

 

“So I was _right!_ ” Lance hollers at everyone. “Okay, Keith, now all you have to do is give the order. We have info. C’mon team leader, let’s go save alternate space!”

 

Lance jabs at Keith impatiently, shoving him more and more as his sentence progresses. Keith grunts and swats his hand away.

 

“Look, we don’t know yet which of the two theories is correct. How are we going to go save this ‘alternate earth’,” he gestures angrily, shoving Lance right back. “If we don’t have a way to access that reality?”

 

“We’ll probably need Slav for that,” Shiro says from his corner in the hangar. Attention falls to him and he quirks his lips to the side. “I mean, he was always talking about them, yeah? And he supposedly appeared in that other alternate reality. It makes sense.”

 

“I’ll go get him in Red! He was hanging back in one of the Marmorite bases,” Lance offers.

 

“We shouldn’t waste time, guys,” Hunk urges. “Should we really split up like that?”

 

“I’ll be in and out! Like a _ninja,_ ” Lance strikes a dramatic pose, his previous sulking forgotten. Coran raises a brow at him. Keith sighs, a fond smile forms on his face. His eyes sweep the room to take it all in. Everyone waits for his orders again.

 

“Hunk,” Keith speaks clearly, “You, Pidge, and Coran will keep searching for information on unknown items on the ship.”

 

“Yessir!” He salutes, and hunches back down into his laptop. Coran leaves sprinting to find Pidge.

 

“Shiro,” Keith turns to him. His breathing stops, his words are stuck in his throat as he stares up at the man he admired so much. His hero. His brother. His idol. His black paladin. But now, his subordinate.

 

Shiro stares right back. He shows no emotion in his face, just attentiveness.

 

“Go with Lance to the Marmorite base. Bring back Slav. Debrief him the moment he sets foot on the ship.”

 

Getting those words out, while trying to look right into Shiro’s eyes and not staring away, was probably one of the hardest things he’s done in his life. Right after the Trials of Marmora.

 

Shiro just nods, and leads Lance out of Yellow’s hangar.

 

That just leaves him and Allura. Hunk was whispering to himself in front of the computer while they look at each other. He had no orders for her. He didn’t know what to do with himself either. He tries to avoid the way Allura looks at him, with a furrow in her brow. She was determined, however, and walks into his line of sight.

 

“Do _you_ believe it is an alternate world?”

 

He could only think about Pidge, the way her face softened and the way she cried and held the glasses. She had confessed to him a memory of her life, something he considered sacred and intimate. She persuaded him with that teary gaze, and her hiccupy voice when she talked to him.

 

“I do.”

 

 


End file.
